Tyranny of Merit

“Elite” wasn’t always a dirty word. Before the 19th century, the term described someone chosen for office. Because this typically occurred in the church, the word possessed distinctly ecclesiastical connotations. The pre-Victorians transformed a word imputing religious status to individual persons into a collective noun with class implications. By the 1830s, “elite” referred to the highest ranks of the nobility.

Those meanings are no longer primary. As invoked by followers of the Tea Party movement, for example, “elite” means essentially a snob. Not, however, a snob of the old, aristocratic breed. In this context, “elite” means men and women who think degrees from famous universities mean they know better than their fellow citizens.

Elites like these don’t just look down on regular folks from provincial perches in Boston or Palo Alto. According to stump speeches, blogs, and TV commentators, they’ve been getting their way on Wall Street and in Washington for years, with disastrous results for the country.

MSNBC host Chris Hayes is no conservative. But he agrees that America is governed by a ruling class that has proved unworthy of its power. According to Hayes, the failures of the last decade created a deep crisis of authority. We counted on elites to do the right thing on our behalf. The Iraq War, steroid scandal in baseball, abuse cover-up in the Catholic Church, incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and, above all, financial crisis showed that they didn’t know enough or care enough to do so.

Twilight of the Elites advances two explanations for these failures. The first emphasizes elite ignorance. People with a great deal of money or power aren’t like the rest of us. Their schedules, pastimes, and even transportation are different to those of ordinary people. This isn’t always because their tastesare distinctive, at least initially. It’s often a job requirement.

In addition to their unusual lifestyles, elite types don’t spend much time with averages Joes. At work, they’re surrounded by subordinates. At home, they live in literally or metaphorically gated communities and socialize with people similar to themselves. Again, there’s nothing sinister about this. Because of their distance from the rest of the population, however, members of the elite often have little idea what’s going on in less rarefied settings.

One consequence, Hayes argues, is that elites have trouble making good decisions. Ignorant of the challenges that the poor and middle-class face and separated from the consequences of their actions, elites are susceptible to making policies that seem reasonable, but which on-the-ground experience would expose as ineffectual. Take the evacuation of New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. It didn’t succeed because many New Orleanians had nowhere to go, no money to get there, and no cars in which to escape—facts the mayor and governor should have known.

The distance of elites can also have moral consequences. When policies fail, isolated elites are more likely to blame their subjects than themselves. Politicians blamed poor New Orleanians for being too lazy to evacuate. Similarly, the sellers of toxic securities blamed their customers for being too stupid to appreciate the risks that they were accepting. In an especially revolting example, members of the national-security establishment blamed Iraqis for failing to appreciate invasion and occupation. For elites like these, it’s always someone else’s fault.

All elites risk falling out of touch, and always have. As Hayes notes, the Declaration of Independence argues that effective authority must be accountable authority. The other aspect of Hayes’s theory of elite failure is more contemporary, though. The problem of ignorance, he argues, is exacerbated by the principle of selection used by our most influential institutions. According to Hayes, modern American elites are distinctive because they acquire status by means of ostensibly objective criteria. As a result, they think they deserve their wealth and power.

The ideal of meritocracy has deep roots in this country. Jefferson dreamed of a “natural aristocracy.” But the modern meritocracy dates only to the 1930s, when Harvard President James Bryant Conant directed his admissions staff to find a measure of ability to supplement the old boys’ network. They settled on the exam we know as the SAT.

In the decades following World War II, standardized testing replaced the gentleman’s agreements that had governed the Ivy League. First Harvard, then Yale and the rest filled with the sons and eventually daughters of Jews, blue-collar workers, and other groups whose numbers had previously been limited.

After graduation, these newly pedigreed men and women flocked to New York and Washington. There, they took jobs once filled by products of New England boarding schools. One example is Lloyd Blankfein, the Bronx-born son of a Jewish postal clerk, who followed Harvard College and Harvard Law School with a job at a white-shoe law firm, which he left to join Goldman Sachs.

Hayes applauds the replacement of the WASP ascendancy with a more diverse cohort. The core of his book, however, argues that the principle on which they rose inevitably undermines itself.

The argument begins with the observation that meritocracy does not oppose unequal social and economic outcomes. Rather, it tries to justify inequality by offering greater rewards to the talented and hardworking.

The problem is that the effort presumes that everyone has the same chance to compete under the same rules. That may be true at the outset. But equality of opportunity tends to be subverted by the inequality of outcome that meritocracy legitimizes. In short, according to Hayes, “those who are able to climb up the ladder will find ways to pull it up after them, or to selectively lower it down to allow their friends, allies and kin to scramble up. In other words: ‘whoever says meritocracy says oligarchy.’”

With a nod to the early 20th-century German sociologist Robert Michels, Hayes calls this paradox the “Iron Law of Meritocracy.”

In the most personal section of the book, he describes the way the Iron Law of Meritocracy operates at his alma mater,Hunter College High School in New York City. Admission to Hunter is based on the results of a single test offered to 6th graders who did well on statewide tests in 5th grade. Because there are no preferences for legacies, donors, members of minority groups, or athletes, admission to Hunter seems like a pure application of the meritocratic principle.

It doesn’t work that way. Although its student body once reflected the racial and economic proportions of the city, Hunter has grown increasingly wealthy and white. Why? In Hayes’s view, rich parents have discovered strategies to game the system. By buying cognitive enhancements like foreign travel, music lessons, tutoring in difficult subjects, and outright test prep, these parents give their kids a substantial leg up.

These children are better prepared than rivals from poor or negligent families. But it’s hard to conclude that they’ve earned their advantage. They’re clearly bright and hardworking. Yet they’ve also been fortunate to have parents who know what it takes to climb the ladder and can pay for those advantages. The ideal of meritocracy obscures the accidents of birth. From Hunter to Harvard to Goldman Sachs, the meritocrats proceed through life convinced that they owe their rise exclusively to their own efforts.

This sense of entitlement is one reason meritocratic elites are particularly susceptible to pathologies of distance. They don’t only have distinctive lifestyles. They’re convinced that they really deserve their privileges.

Of course, most elites have fancied themselves a superior breed. The way meritocracy obscures the role of chance, however, encourages the modern elite to think of themselves as unusually deserving individuals rather than members of a ruling class with responsibilities to the rest of society.

Finally, Hayes argues, the selection of the elite for academic accomplishment leads to a cult of intelligence that discounts the practical wisdom necessary for good decision-making. Remember Enron? They were the smartest guys in the room.

Hayes oversells his argument as a unified explanation of the “fail decade.” Although it elucidates some aspects of the Iraq War, Katrina debacle, and financial crisis, these disasters had other causes. Nevertheless, the Iron Law of Meritocracy shows why our elites take the form they do and how they fell so out touch with reality. In Hayes’s account, the modern elite is caught in a feedback loop that makes it less and less open and more and more isolated from the rest of the country.

What’s to be done? One answer is to rescue meritocracy by providing the poor and middle class with the resources to compete. A popular strategy focuses on education reform. If schools were better, the argument goes, poor kids could compete on an equal footing for entry into the elite. The attempt to rescue meritocracy by fixing education has become a bipartisan consensus, reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Race to the Top.”

Hayes rejects this option. The defect of meritocracy, in his view, is not the inequality of opportunity that it conceals, but the inequality of outcome that it celebrates. In other words, the problem is not that the son of a postal clerk has less chance to become a Wall Street titan than he used to. It’s that the rewards of a career on Wall Street have become so disproportionate to the rewards of the traditional professions, let alone those available to a humble civil servant.

Hayes’s prescription, then, is simple: we should raise taxes on the rich and increase redistributive payments to the poor and middle class.

Raising taxes is surprisingly popular, at least in principle. According to one poll Hayes cites, 81 percent of Americans favor a surtax on incomes over $1 million a year. Nevertheless, these seem unlikely to be enacted. Among other reasons, the legislators who would have to approve them are either drawn from or depend on the same class that the taxes target.

Yet Hayes is optimistic about the prospects for egalitarian reform. He places his hopes on a radicalized upper-middle class. As recently as a decade ago, people with graduate degrees and six-figure incomes could think of themselves as prospective members of the elite. While the income and influence of the very rich has zoomed ahead, however, the stagnation of the economy has left the moderately well-off at risk of proletarianization.

Despite their ideological differences, both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street draw support from this class. It’s just that the Tea Party appeals to the parents, while Occupy mobilizes the kids.

Could a radicalized upper-middle class turn from the bulwark of meritocracy into its opponent? That seems unlikely for three reasons.

First, the polls Hayes mentions do not document popular support for redistribution. They indicate that Americans want to tax the rich to cover the deficit. Americans like their current entitlements and want to keep them. But there’s no evidence that they endorse the egalitarian agenda Hayes has in mind.

Second, there’s a tension between this agenda and the social liberalism to which Hayes is committed. Social scientists have found that we’re willing to share resources with others like ourselves. We’re reluctant, however, to make sacrifices for people we consider different or objectionable.

In a section on the “two eras of equality,” Hayes urges us to adopt the solidaristic norms that characterize relatively homogeneous societies, including the United States circa 1960. At the same time, he praises the diversity and freedom of contemporary America. These things don’t go together, in practice if not in principle.

The tax regime of 50 years ago was legitimatized by a broad consensus about the proper uses of shared prosperity. The more libertarian views dominant today are also relatively consistent across economic and social realms. Hayes thinks that we can combine the economic virtues of the former era with the social virtues of latter. That’s wishful thinking.

I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Hayes is not a conservative. That’s no defect in itself. But this book would have been improved, in the end, by engaging with the conservative tradition.

The central insight of this tradition is that there is no society without a governing class. Whether they’re selected by birth, intelligence, or some other factor, some people inevitably exercise power over others. Hayes mounts a powerful critique of the meritocratic elite that has overseen one of the most disastrous periods of recent history. He lapses into utopianism, however, when he suggests that we can do without elites altogether. Like the poor, elites will always be with us. As the word’s original meaning suggests, the question is how they ought to be chosen.

Samuel Goldman is a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a contributor to TAC’s State of the Union blog.

MORE IN ARTS &AMP; LETTERS

Hide 39 comments

39 Responses to Tyranny of Merit

One thing: If people who spend oodles of money to go to universities do not, in fact, know more than their less educated citizens, what is the point of university? I should hope they know more…they have been spending a great deal of time and effort to learn new things. The average person does not spend 1/10th the time learning new things. This attitude is one of the biggest problems with the USA right not. There is more respect for financial success (even when it is inherited) than there is for intellectual accomplishment. I suspect this portends major problems for the USA in the coming years.

Most universities have become little more than leftist indoctrination centers, and as such, fail to provide students with robust curricula that includes opinions and views opposing liberal ideology. In this way, students are cheated both financially and intellectually, and as a result, many graduate knowing little more than leftist talking points which they regurgitate reflexively. Thoroughly indoctrinated students think they know more than conservatives. They fail to understand that it’s not the things you don’t know that make you stupid: it’s the things you know that are wrong.

Why is it that I find myself more simpatico with progressive sociological insights/ideas than 95% of what I hear from conservatives (excepting, of course, PJB and Ron Paul)? Both the Democrats and Republicans are singular in their neo-con foreign policy and their acquiescence to the finance-based economy. But when it comes to this present meritocracy it is heavily liberal– whether it is on the Volvos at Holton-Arms or the Mercedes SUV’s at Newton Country Day School, the only difference is the Van Hollen sticker on the former and the Warren sticker on the latter. IMO, Occupy Wall Streeters are correct on their fundamental complaint about the system. To quote the Venerable Fulton Sheen, “Man is not for the economy, but the economy is for man.” This is the fundamental starting point for traditional Catholic social teaching and economics (solidarism). We are eviscerating the middle class while promoting and facilitating this meritocracy. This will bring us into being a third-world country in a fast way. But hey, we can keep the tech and knowledge (meritocratic) economy going as long as the trillion-dollar government-defense spending keeps going.

I’d say that what he is missing is the point of becoming an elite in the first place. The reason people want to be an elite is make tons of money, and they don’t realize that it can hurt others by making all that money (offshoring, importing cheap labor). But their conscience is clear because making money, maximizing ones preferences, is the point of life. There needs to be the old fashioned virtue of loyalty instilled in the elites: loyalty to their people to do what’s best for all of us. But choosing your people over others is evil evil evil in today’s thoughts. Everone’s an individual, don’t you know? And no one owes anyone any loyalty.

Looks like time to revisit Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of the circulation of elites. On a quick read of this review, one wonders if Hayes’s proposal for redistributive taxation would result in just such a substitution of a new elite for the old one, rather than the eqalitarian paradise he seems to want. Remember Russia, the USSR and the replacement of the nobility by the nomenklatura?

“showed that they didn’t know enough or care enough to do so.” replace poli-speak “elites” with plutocrats; and you’ll find the answer. hint: it sounds like; they knew exactly what they were doing BECAUSE they only care about their own interests and the interests of the other plutocrats. the term elite used in a negative context is a creation of the ownership class (the 1%, as it were). might as well use immigrants, homosexuals, liberals/conservatives, etc.

There needs to be the old fashioned virtue of loyalty instilled in the elites: loyalty to their people to do what’s best for all of us. But choosing your people over others is evil evil evil in today’s thoughts. Everone’s an individual, don’t you know?

Are you sure loyalty is the virtue you think Mr. Romney lacks? One could argue that, in fact, he shows sterling loyalty to those he considers “his people,” meaning those he rubs shoulders with regularly and the people of his cultural and economic class.

I think the word you are looking for is civicmindedness, which denotes an interest in the well-being of the broader community of all one’s fellow Americans. Rightly or wrongly, the form of civicmindedness that suggests the wealthy should contribute more of their resources to the public American commons is out of fashion in the GOP at present.

WASP morality had virtue as a mainstay, but rested as well on a thick foundation of racial, religious and class bigotry. It’s hard to get a person to act against self-interest and for the community, without rewarding that person with either a lot of money or a sense of “inherent” superiority.

Like democracy, meritocracy is the best of a bad set of choices, as I’m sure W. Churchill would agree, snob that he was. But maybe it can be improved by a habit of appointing persons of modest academic and social background but substantial experience and skill (and that can be tested for to an extent) to places of governmental power. Even pure political appointments might have that virtue.

Eli, “civicmindedness” and “contribution” certainly go hand in hand and are practiced by Mr. Romney in great quantities. The GOP admires these moral characteristics in its candidates and its supporters. Mr. Romney, as with most conservatives, statisticaly engage in far more charity than those of the Democratic party persuasion. The word “contribution” is by definition a form of voluntary giving of one’s resources. On the other hand said GOP members recognize your misuse of the language which substitutes taxation (to which you are actualy refering and which is a compulsory taking of one’s resources, ultimately at the point of a gun) for voluntary donations. That burden also falls disproportionately on the wealthy under our current tax code. A suggestion that the wealthy should contribute more of their resources is noble. A forced taking is not noble, in fact quite the opposite. The coveting of another man’s wealth for your own purposes is in fact recognized as immoral. The American public commons are those which are few and well defined in the nation’s founding constitution. The immoral and suicidal definition by today’s left should be scorned. Unfortunately, the American left has turned their back on those founding documents. Theories resulting from such circumstances will be largely out of fashion in the GOP.

This article describes perfectly the “meddler’s syndrome” that seems to infect so many “intellectuals”. It puts me in mind of some relative of Supreme Court “Justice” Kagan: (To paraphrase) She and her friends were thinking, always thinking. Yes, and coming up with the same conclusions, always erudite to the point of obscurity, and forever requiring things such as “income redistribution”…

tevegas says that conservatives give more in charity than liberals, and this is true. It is also true that the wealthy, those who have the disposable wealth to share as charity, are disproportionately conservative. Don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back over that one. It is incorrect, however, to state that the wealthy pay a progressive tax rate. Once you factor in local and payroll taxes, the poor pay more in total taxes than the wealthy. This is true even before you factor in the tax dodges wealthy individuals like Romney use to game the system. We actually have a regressive, not a progressive, tax system in the country at the moment. That it has come to this, and that even working class people seem to feel that this is fair, just proves the point that the meritocracy benefits from a sense of entitlement which even extends to those ‘beneath’ them who have been brainwashed into self-identifying with the meritocracy. I recently saw a beat up pickup truck with the bumper sticker: ‘Covet my work ethic not my wealth’. Fox News has certainly been doing a good job of indoctrinating their viewers. Most of Viewers of Fox couldn’t tell you who Ayn Rand was, and they likely would have burnt her as a witch had they known and were she still around. Still, altruism and civicmindedness are indeed at new low. We have instead the cult of the individual and the battle cry of us against them.

Why should it surprise that if you undermine the way in which meritocracy selects competence for demanding careers, you don’t get meritocracy? Moreover, the article assumes that selection is a one-off affair, i.e. that once you are in you are in, but the selected ones continue competing with one another in all kinds of ways. Take a look at sports, which is the best example we have of a working meritocracy. Yes, there is doping and corruption, but also conter-measures in place. If the fact that they do not work perfectly bothers you, what alternative to competitive sports do you propose for selecting champions?

We don’t have a meritocracy. Too many former standards (including cultural, moral, character, religious, ethnic and even intellectual tests) have been lowered or eliminated for the word to apply.

The current crisis of institutional, moral, spiritual and intellectual authority – the financial collapse, the bailouts, the shameful wars, the debt, sex predators in the churches, even the current unprecedented situation at Harvard, in which over 100 students are under investigation for academic dishonesty in a single course – suggests that our meritocracy … isn’t one. Rather, we have an elite that proclaims itself a meritocracy in order to justify itself, preserve its ranks and concretize presumptions inhibiting the sort of analyses that might accurately diagnose its true character and the causes of its failures.

“Hunter has grown increasingly wealthy and white. Why? In Hayes’s view, rich parents have discovered strategies to game the system. By buying cognitive enhancements like foreign travel, music lessons, tutoring in difficult subjects, and outright test prep, these parents give their kids a substantial leg up.”

Where is the discussion of genes here. My guess is the smart parents pass on smart genes to their children. There may room for who you know to help at the very highest levels (I highly doubt Mitt Romney or George W. Bush got where they are now on pure merit), but below that very high level your relative position in the social hierarchy does seem to be mostly determined by your own intelligence, charisma and grit, most of which have a large genetic component.

None of this is to deny the very real and very damaging problems with entitlement and isolation created by meritocracy. But Hayes overstates his case, but those are the perils of ignoring The Bell Curve.

Could it be that the problem lies in how we discern/create an elite? Our supposedly top colleges and universities hand out A’s at a higher rate than last year’s fashions–and what students are called upon to learn is highly leavened nonsense.

So long as customers are willing to pay $40,000 for brummagem, the problem will only grow worse.

The fundamental misapprehension of the article is recapitulated in the comments. There is no conservative tradition and there are no conservatives in the United States. There is no great conservative wellspring of knowledge, tradition and meaning in America. Conservatism is merely a brand identity for a variety of ugly and irrational belief systems desperate to avoid accountability and reason.
We have biological racists who want to assert that some science supports their prejudices (Bell Curve is a fraudulent rehash of the 19th century scientific racist movement).
We have people who think they can free ride on others’ contributions by declaring taxation to be thievery (yet no one makes them stay here to pay taxes-they are worse than illegal immigrants, who pay into the system with no chance of recouping that loss just to stay here). Where is libertarian heaven on earth? Somalia? Kazakhstan?
We have wacky conspiracy theorists who think that colleges merely teach leftist indoctrination and nothing else-I hope these people aren’t flying in planes designed by leftist engineers-they certainly haven’t boycotted the socialist government run and designed internet.
There is no conservative movement. There is only a loose confederation of reactionaries united by their envy of others’ real victimhood, desire not to be kicked off the gravy train and lack of connection with reality.
Our “conservative” institutions have all failed because they could not live up to their own standards; it has become impossible to reasonably deny this fact thanks to the internet. This is why the conservative movement has become like other authoritarian extremist movements in history. This explains the demographics of the GOP. And this explains why the political movement that has spent the last 40 years spreading corruption and disaster can’t improve the situation; you can’t help a sick dog by adding more ticks, leeches and tapeworms.

What has been written in the context of America is true even for the entire global system.
The problem as has been rightly pointed out above stems from unequal opportunity. Poor due to poor education, negligent parents and family pressure can rarely compete with the elite. I think we can learn from the Chinese education system of enforced free and uniform education to all the people up to an extent say high school.
Another point is rewards for unequal outcomes.
The point is we think(justify ourselves) to put elite in the ranks where they been better educated can sail the ship far more better(apparently) in the turbulent weather.
For that laws have to be formulated to minimize risk taking in financial sector, to decrease this turbulence making it a calmer ocean, where quick decision making/risk taking ability wont be rewarded. This in turn would shift the flow of elites from financial sector to seek innovation in traditional professions and even to explorer new territory, that should be suitably rewarded that which pushes the frontier of society and gets people jobs.

“I mentioned at the beginning of this review that Hayes is not a conservative. That’s no defect in itself.”

Gosh. Magnanimous of you. So non-conservatives are only defective when this non-conservative state is combined with other qualities, is that it?

“Redistribution” is the most dishonest repeated word, and concept here. It’s not redistribution when the money of those with less exalted jobs flows upward to Mitt Romney, say, only when it goes the other way. The potential help for homeowners that Rick Santelli ranted about that sparked the Tea Party was redistribution, but the billions in help that financial institutions had just gotten wasn’t redistribution.

Redistribution could just as easily be used to describe what happens within the circles of those with most of the money, and it’s a very small part of the population indeed. The basic concept is that the money belongs in one place, and is “re”-distributed to others instead. One could say the same about profits coming in based on the hard work of employees that gets siphoned upward so that most of it doesn’t reach their pockets.

This isn’t the only way that society has to work. It’s just an extension of the warlordism that used to be the law of the land, and still is in societies with no government. I’m sure you’d all last several hours, at least, in places like that.

As a former executive with a United Way non-profit, I can attest to the dishonesty of portraying the rich as extremely generous givers. Big incomes and elite social networking pervade the boards and management of charities – the rich get far back more than they contribute.

Our elites have become as self-referential as before any social upheaval in history – not only do they believe they deserve all they’ve got, they believe they deserve far more – and anyone who isn’t of their class, deserves to be punished by becoming poorer, in a perverse adoption of the rich get richer, the poor poorer” aphorism.

Nothing will change their attitude nor loosen their grip, other than failures for which they are finally held accountable. With a Homeland Security structure that’s de facto in place to protect their interests, not ours, as in any state whose rulers govern with a security state infrastructure, this will be a very long time with increased distress for most.

To raise a meritocratic child requires, in addition to genetics, an investment over two decades that would be difficult to duplicate for $1 million for someone who did not have committed parents. It’s not a question of hiring tutors, and gaming. It requires two decades of formations of mind, discipline, social skills and character. Obviously, not every meritocrat has the latter two.

But the point is that becoming and staying part of the “meritocracy” is not easy.

Also, in the US, there is not just a simple meritocrcay of Ivy grads in finance, law and politics. There are many intersecting elites. Detailing them would require actual legwork and thought, however.

It is my impression that Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia had more to do with the rise of the SAT, but I don’t have detailed knowledge.

Ragnar Thorulfsen: “There is no great conservative wellspring of knowledge, tradition and meaning in America.” Try reading the founding documents of these United States of America, their Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

“Conservatism is merely a brand identity for a variety of ugly and irrational belief systems desperate to avoid accountability and reason.”

I wanted to repeat his entire comment, but this quote pretty much encapsulates why research routinely reveals how much better conservatives understand the liberal worldview than vice versa. Thanks for the rationality though.

Randy…”tevegas says that conservatives give more in charity than liberals, and this is true. It is also true that the wealthy, those who have the disposable wealth to share as charity, are disproportionately conservative. Don’t hurt yourself patting yourself on the back over that one.”

Study after study shows self-identifying conservatives give more than self-identifying liberals AFTER adjustment for income levels. In addition, conservatives tend to give to boots on the ground type charities, those that feed poor children for example, whereas liberals tend to the dominant players in the arts.

A case in point….Mitt has a steady stream of people who attest to his being there for him when they most needed it. Obama, on the other hand argues passionately we ‘are our brother’s keeper’ as a support for his policy of higher taxes, yet his own brother, his own actual brother, lives in a shanty town in Africa on $6 a month, and Obama doesn’t help him.

That to me is who each of them are. All the flowery talk is just talk. When the chips are down, who steps up to the plate? It sure isn’t Obama.

The disconnect between effective authority and accountable authority is the problem with American business culture in a nutshell. Upper echelons fail upward and lower echelons fail (or even succeed) downward. With the right connections, accountability is a chimera.

The problem isn’t that there are too few taxes; rather, it’s that there is even one tax deduction.

When the first Republican sought permission to leave the world of the laborer and to enter the realm of the self-employed, the cost of doing business is what he agreed to take with him. For what other reason would the first Democrat have considered carrying that guy’s load for so long as one minute.

The problem isn’t meritocracy; it’s that the rewards for those who succeed in the meritocratic system are so skewed. Other countries have meritocracies too, but the rewards are not so poisonously uneven.

In almost every example cited of meritocracy, the argument white washes the ‘whiteness’ of elites, Hunter high school isnt disproportionately white, neither Yale, nor Elena Kagan’s choice of new law professors evidences white priviledge, that is, if we mean white anglo saxon protestants-catholics. A true IQ meritocracy would for example take all the entrants over a certain IQ level from each ethnic group, and the resulting stratification would be consistent with the IQ densities across these groups. But thats not the case. North Asian and WASP proportion of meritocratic institutions is highly underrepresnted by these statistical measures . On its face then, the system is not truly meritocratic, but evidentiary of an entrenched ethnic discrimination system by a group we cannot even name.

Hunter College High School is disproportionately Asian, if anything. Like the other so-called elite educational institutions in many parts of the country, Asians constitute a proportion way above their numbers in the population. Whites are often under-represented in these places, depending on what geographic level you use as a reference point. But the “wealthy and white” fiction is a lot more palatable to the anti-meritocracy types who perceive black and Hispanic failure and fall into total panic mode. Most of the Asians who enter elite institutions are from poor backgrounds, yet rise through efforts and solid family contributions. Culture anyone?

Marcie Chu’s comment raises an interesting question. If poor Asians are being chosen for early rungs of the ladder to elitism, can we expect rich, anglo Christians to begin falling from the top? Is there an objective study of mobility in and out of the elite? What percent of elites 20 years ago are still elite? …40 years ago? Can the idea that those who get in, stay in, be an illusion?

I appreciate many of the other comments critical of the article. The author confuses elites, universities, meritocracy, education. Having worked for the US. federal gov’t and universities my entire career, I’ve seen the differences among all these. There is a long history of the justice and injustice of elite exploitation of institutions. Even that is coupled with internal norms and procedures of Congress, which is not a meritocracy. Meritocracy at the State and local gov’t arose in the 1880s to protect administrative workers from the whims of political favoritism. The elite university recruitment goes on mainly in the political parties and Congress rather than administration. Anyway, I could go on, but the article is confused and misleading.

“Among other reasons, the legislators who would have to approve them are either drawn from or depend on the same class that the taxes target.” One factor which is missing in this sentence is that many legislators now are part of the “elite:” how many of them have entered Congress from the middle or upper-middle class and left Congress as millionaires? Surely, not what the Founders intended.